


Here

by Asimiento



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-14 03:29:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14761758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asimiento/pseuds/Asimiento
Summary: The dead leave no dust. Just one last gasp of air, caught by the rolling wind, stretching out into the sweep of tall grass bending to an unrelenting invisible pressure.





	Here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cobalamincosel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cobalamincosel/gifts).



> For Moon

The world falls silent.

The dead leave no dust. Just one final gasp of air, caught by the rolling wind, stretching out into the sweep of tall grass bending to an unrelenting invisible pressure.

A man runs deep into the cover of the forest, past the battlefield, carried by the wide strides of his mechanical suit, leaving a depressed trail of flattened land. Somewhere nobody will hear him, the man climbs off his suit, shoving it aside. As it clatters to the ground with its heavy metal sigh, the man lets out a scream.

The rest of them look onward, past the carnage, into the interminable sky, in all its calm and silent blueness, heedless of any destruction that had come to pass. What one does post an apocalyptic nightmare of unfathomable scale is unclear. They pay their respects to the departed and make stock of the present, simultaneously. Responsibilities are apportioned to those spared. Queues of succession are duly advanced, and a new queen is hastily crowned under the cover of a vast holographic bush. The men with the unearned presumptuousness to call themselves Earth’s mightiest are promptly whisked back to a compound somewhere in Upstate New York.

The silence follows them there.

Nobody knows what to make of their lot. They lock themselves in a glass room as they attempt to unpack the nature of what had just transpired—whether any of it is reversible, the relevance of inquiring upon an utterly incomprehensible motive, the actual scale of such arbitrary annihilation, and how life must now progress, as it should, and how the rest must all adapt given no alternatives. Proposals are put forward and rejected and negotiated and advanced and denied again and again in goddamned senatorial fashion.

A man stands abruptly, pulse quickening, mind racing, blood boiling. The room falls silent, arid, eerily still. Someone else motions slowly with a hand, imploring the man to calm down. The man on his feet catches his own reflection in one of the glass panels. His neck is mottled green.

_Hey there, Hulk. How brilliant of you to want to show up at the worst possible time. Damn._

Bruce Banner leaves the conference room in a haze of frustration, heading straight to the nearest restroom, slamming the door in melodramatic fashion. He shuts his eyes tight and takes long, deep breaths.

_This is a tyrannical alien teleology you’re investigating with human logic, man. What’s the point of making sense of any of it?_

He checks the medicine cabinet for some aspirin.

He knocks back a cup of mouthwash, instead.

_Feel that sting splitting your skull? That’s your conscious thought getting pulled out into a veritable redshift, Banner. Spreading wide, spreading thin, heading out, careening into nowhere._

He pours another cup and sloshes it lightly, considering the little vortex he’s made. The void he’s falling into.

He pours the mouthwash down the drain.

_Banner weak._

_Shut up, Hulk._

He stumbles out and almost swings the door into an arguable living deity. Thor considers him with an earnest eye-to-eye gaze. Endless sky to bleakest wasteland. The world is beginning to take on the askew tilt of a disorienting Dutch angle. Good call, with that throwing the second cup out.

Bruce braces himself, applying the pressure of caution down to ease the tension of his own distress, willing the green patches of skin to fade out. A hand is extended to him. Slowly. Carefully. The last time this happened, he took it and throttled Thor like a ragdoll. Well, the Hulk did, but what’s the difference?

Bruce shakes his head and walks.

He moves past Thor, chasing down the absurd inquiry darting through his mind, an elusive fly, the full scope of his intellect a net with holes far too huge, his every swing far too slow.

“What’s the lowest common denominator for measuring life on Asgard?” Bruce asks, more knee-jerk spitballing than an honest-to-god inquiry. (Honest to god, hah.) “If you have to demarcate every tangible mass into living versus non-living. Is anything with biotic potential classified as living or are we talking strictly lifeforms with sentient motor functions? Both consume resources. And yet the trees in Wakanda certainly hadn’t been halved. And yet, that other tree just…vanished. I can’t tell if that’s negligence or hubris.” He’s gesticulating with all the wordless frustration he can bring to bear.

They reach the end of the line, standing atop a walkway overlooking the rest of the compound through fields of glass. Bruce looks out, catches the green patches of grass blending in with his reflection.

_Banner upset._

_So what, Hulk? Everybody’s upset._

Thor lays a hand on his shoulder. “Something as small as a blade of grass bears life,” he responds calmly. “So do many other things elusive to the eye. Either scale or if it’s invisible, like err, Vættr _._ If that’s the point you’re trying to make.”

Bruce wants to laugh. Or cry. Anything more satisfactory than incoherent rage. Something to free up the overflowing standpipe of his frustration.

“It’s just so reductive, man! The notion that all life on a barely scaled universe could have possibly reached maximum occupancy. Put this under the scrutiny of any germane framework and the whole argument collapses. Even held under the lens of, damn, I don’t know, materialism, eugenics, the biopsychosocial habitus…none of it holds up. I mean, what’s the point?”

Thor only nods, keeping his steady grip on Bruce’s shoulder. Bruce exhales. Out of the corner of his eye he realizes there’s a tremor to Thor’s hand. Huh, he never consider the idea of a god being frightened.

He exhales again and realizes the tremor’s locus is elsewhere. Another exhale tells him. Yeah. He’s been shaking. Well, uneasy shaking has been the baseline state for quite sometime. His incognizance is justifiable.

“Sorry,” he says, abrupt shame crumpling the word to near soundlessness.

“It’s all right, Banner,” Thor responds, a little soundlessly too.

Bruce starts to rub his eyes with his thumbs. Irritated lacrimal ducts. Stupid. “For the better part of a decade I’ve existed on the fringes, surviving on only what the exigencies of life require. I’ve isolated myself from any sort of vital human connection for so long that all I can do is comprehend loss in the abstract.”

He looks up, holding as firm a gaze as he can manage. Unrelenting void to boundless sea.

“Your people are gone,” Bruce says, incredulous. “Your brother is gone. It’s not all right.”

Thor looks away, out to the field, somewhere past the compound. “I know that,” is all he says.

Of course he does. Thor is being polite. Or sensitive, in the presence of such tragically fragile company. _Dredge some more, why don’t you, genius?_

_Banner stupid._

_Okay, Hulk, I’ll give you that._

Thor walks a few paces away. A cautious berth. Or perhaps a respectful distance. Bruce attempts to deliver his rather clumsy apology but Thor holds a hand up to him.

“Banner, you’ve isolated yourself from the very people you’ve come to care for, in order to protect them from yourself. You’ve known loss for longer than many of us,” he says.

Thor regards him again, with an inscrutable expression, and Bruce is suddenly acutely aware of his own mouth going dry.

Suddenly and unwillingly, Bruce is loosening the tap on that overflowing standpipe. It must be the exhaustion. It must be the unexpectedly overwhelming blend of sympathy and pity and commiseration and esteem being thrown his way. He hasn’t really cried in a long time. It’s overdue, anyway.

He looks out toward the darkening horizon. Their side of the earth continuing its slow stationary turn, the fabulous glow of the sun fading as it makes its descent. His reflection on the glass is a muddier green, now.

“We’re going to fix this,” Bruce says, with high confidence, low substantiation, still easing out of the shakes.

“I don’t doubt we will,” Thor answers, unequivocal in his certainty.

They watch the sky shift to a vast purple expanse in silence. Somewhere within the complex, people in different stages of shared grief are shouting over each other, heaping their opprobrium in internecine fashion, at the crest of their mourning, everything impossibly pressing in the heat of the moment.

Bruce looks up at the cruel, indifferent, interminable horizon. He considers the emergent chaos befalling any tangible extant thing in the known universe, living or non-living. People have always found ways to move forward. A biological existence is often unsparing in its cruelty, and yet life persists.

Suppose it is irreversible. Suppose this is their life moving forward. Suppose this is all there is now. Them. Here.

They have to make it work. They all do.

Sun’s going down.

Thor extends a hand to him again, slowly, carefully, in the manner of people in the distant past navigating uncharted waters, led only by the fortuitous hand of the guiding winds, and the birds in the sky, and the stars at night. Bruce takes it.

They make their way back.

**Author's Note:**

> “The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. **Here. I am here.** This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive.”
> 
> \- Claudia Rankine, _Don’t Let Me Be Lonely_


End file.
